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Democratic Adviser Carville Plans Attack On Whitewater Prosecutor

November 25, 1996|By From Tribune News Services.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrat strategist James Carville said Sunday he was setting up a group to attack Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr and tell the public that Starr was working for the Republicans.

Starr was appointed as an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater land deal involving investments by the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton. His investigation has expanded to include questions surrounding the firing of the White House travel office staff and White House use of FBI background files on Republicans.

Carville said the main role for the committee would be to inform the public through newspaper advertisements about Starr's background.

"I'm going to get incorporated. We're going to be able to raise a lot of money and we're going straight dead ahead with this," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

"He ought not to have subpoena power over the president to advance the right-wing agenda," said Carville, who was a top adviser in President Clinton's first campaign for the White House.

Carville dismissed comparisons between the appointment of Starr, a Republican, as an investigator of a Democratic president and the appointment of Democrat Archibald Cox to investigate President Richard Nixon's White House in 1973.

Carville said his committee had not been sanctioned by Clinton and that the White House had earlier tried to talk him out of targeting Starr.